With the rapid expansion in the number of people using the internet that has come about in recent years, portable information terminals such as personal computers, portable telephones, PDA's and pagers, etc., have rapidly become widespread as ways of connecting to the internet both in business, at home, and in schools, etc. One reason for this is the existence of message exchange systems such as e-mail and internet news systems, etc. In recent years, new kinds of message exchange systems that integrate various message systems such as systems that convert messages (such as e-mail) into speech for transfer to a telephone, systems that convert messages into speech at a terminal which is then read out, systems where notification of the arrival of an e-mail is outputted to a pager in the possession of the user of the destination, and systems where image information from a fax machine is transmitted as multimedia e-mail with information terminals have recently started to appear. These services centering on messages such as e-mail and speech synthesis have brought about a further increase in users.
An essential function of such message exchange systems is to be able to read out e-mail and networked news on a telephone. However, such e-mail and networked news is completed with the intention that a recipient may read this information with the naked eye, and cases where information is included that cannot be converted to speech are common. For example, characters indicating a facial expression (also referred to as pictographs, ascii art and glyphs) can be used in order to convey subtle feelings and facial nuances of the writer in e-mails or networked news.
For example, FIG. 20(b) is a view showing an example of a face inputted as a facial expression. Numeral 291 in FIG. 20(b) is an example of a typical e-mail face inputted using simple facial characters. In FIG. 20(b), numeral 292 represents a facial character made using parenthesis “(“and ”)”, and the symbols “^” and “.” and meaning “smile”, and numeral 293 is a facial character made from parenthesis “(“and ”)” and the symbols “_”, “{grave over ( )}” and “.” and meaning “sorry!”.
When this kind of character string is read out in related text to speech converter systems, the characters are read out one at a time, which means that the feelings of the sender are not conveyed to the recipient.
Related technology for enabling text to speech conversion of facial characters is cited in published unexamined Japanese Patent Application No. Hei. 11-305987. In this reference, “facial expressions” are represented as being “pictographs”. The following is a description of technology disclosed in this reference.
FIG. 20 is a view describing related technology disclosed in this document, with FIG. 20(a) showing the overall configuration of a text to speech synthesizer 281. The text to speech synthesizer 281 comprises a text input device 282 for receiving text input from outside of the apparatus, a facial character extraction device 283 for searching facial characters from within the input text 287, a facial character reading converter 284 for converting facial characters retrieved in accordance with a facial character reading table 285 into readings, and a speech synthesizer for converting the input text 287 converted by the facial character reading converter 284 into synthesized speech.
Table 1 is a view of the facial character reading table 285.
TABLE 1Facial charactersReading({circumflex over ( )}· {circumflex over ( )})“smile”(_∘ _)“sorry!”
The facial character reading table 285 is in a format where the “facial character” and the reading when synthesized as speech are held as a single group.
FIG. 20(b) shows the text 294 after carrying out conversion of the inputted text 291 and the reading of the facial character.
In the following, a description is given of the operation of the text to speech converter of the related art. When text data is inputted to the text input device 282, the facial character extraction device 283 searches for facial characters by referring to facial character data recorded in the facial character reading table 285. In the example in FIG. 20(b), two facial characters, 292 and 293, are retrieved. Next, the facial character reading converter 284 converts locations of the facial characters into readings in accordance with the facial character reading table 285 (refer to table 1) for output as text 294. Finally, the speech synthesizer 286 converts the converted text data 294 into synthesized speech. As a result of the above processing, facial character portions that cannot conventionally be put into the form of speech or are put into speech in the form of symbol names one character at a time can be read out as synthesized speech.
In the related art disclosed in the reference described above, facial character portions can be converted to readings that can be synthesized as speech by providing a table for registering the facial characters and a device for retrieving, extracting and then converting text data from the facial characters.
However, the following problems exist with the related art.
(1) Registration of facial characters puts pressure on resources. Namely, if facial characters to be read out are to be additionally registered, both the table size (amount of memory used) and the load on the search processing increase.
If this is to be added as a listing, this will increase table size (amount of memory used) and increase the load placed on the search processing. This is also linked to increases in production costs in environments where resources are limited such as in portable information terminals.
(2) Facial characters are also created independently by users and their types therefore also continue to increase. According to the related art, there are no means for reading out facial characters other than those recorded in the facial character table in order to provide compatibility with each time the facial characters continue to increase. However, there is also a limit on the number of facial characters that can be recorded due to limits with regards to resources.